How Techies Are Helping Haiti

One of the bright spots in the bleak news following the earthquake in Haiti has been the incredible way people have deployed technology to rapidly aid the response. I've been tracking some of the more exciting trends, and while this list isn't exhaustive, I wanted to take a moment to share some of what I've seen:

Hope For Haiti Now: The staff at Twitter created this site in order to aggregate the Twitter community's response to the crisis, and provide nonprofits raising money via Twitter with helpful tips for maximizing their distribution.

Vanilla Helps Haitian Families Reunite: This is one of my favorite stories, because it shows how tech products often get used in great ways completely unexpected by their developers. In this case, a Haitian expat in Florida used Vanilla, a free forum tool, to immediately set up a forum for posting information about missing relatives in the local language. The story got on the news, thousands of people came to the site, and a few dozen families were reunited through the tool -- much to developer Mark O'Sullivan's surprise.

Volunteers Power the Open Crowdsourcing Movement: If Ushahidi's rapid deployment demonstrates the power of crowdsourcing, it also shows how that crowdsourcing only works with extremely good management. This post explains how thought-out the operational structure for the response has been, despite the fact that most people involved are volunteers.

Developers Band Together To Create Apps For Haiti: Here, Mashable chronicles the movement of web developers banding together to improve existing applications like the Open Streetmaps tool emergency responders use, as well as to build new ones like Wehaveweneed.org. For some additional context, check out O'Rielly Media in this post.

Haiti Rewired: For more information about technology and Haiti, Wired Magazine has set up this Ning social network with tons of blog posts and other information about who is getting involved and how.

At the end of the day, it's important to remember that these are small triumphs in a wider sea of sorrow.  And when we think about the root causes of this disaster, we shouldn't fail to recall the underlying poverty that dramatically amplified the quake's destruction. Still, the hope that lingers after any disaster lies in the capacity of the human spirit for empathy and resilience. It's tremendous to see a whole new generation of innovators create a fresh set of tools to give that spirit wings.

Photo Credit: k1ng